Hacker News Reader

Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

I've heard this argument, but it also doesn't pass the sniff test in 2025.

1. When is the next transition on bits? Is Apple going to suddenly move to 128-bit? No.

2. When is the next transition on architecture? Is Apple going to suddenly move back to x86? No.

3. When is the next API transition? Is Apple suddenly going to add Vulkan or reinvigorate OpenGL? No. They've been clear it's Metal since 2014, 11 years ago. That's plenty of time for the industry to follow if they cared, and mobile gaming has adopted it without issue.

We might as well complain that the PlayStation 4 was completely incompatible with the PlayStation 3.

View on HN

What happens when apple switches to riscv, or depreciates versions of metal in a backwards incompatible way, or mandates some new code signing technique?

The attitude in the apple developer ecosystem is that apple tells you to jump, and you ask how high.

You could complain that Playstation 4 software is incompatible with Playstation 3. This is the PC gaming industry, there are higher standards for the compatibility of software that only a couple companies can ignore.

Apple will never transition to RISC-V; especially when they cofounded ARM. They have 35 years of institutional knowledge in ARM. Their cores and techniques are licensed and patented with mixtures of their own IP and ARM-compatible IP. That is decades away, if ever. Even the assumption RISC-V will eventually achieve equality with ARM performance is untested; as sometimes ISAs do fail at scale (Itanium anyone? While unlikely to repeat; even a discovered 5% structural difference in the negative would handicap adoption permanently.)

"This is the PC gaming industry"

Who said Apple needed to present themselves as a PC gaming alternative over a console alternative?

Consoles are dying and PCs are replacing them. Like the original commenter suggested, people want to run PC games. The market has decided that the benefits of compatibility outweigh the added complexity. On the PC you have access to a massive expanding back-catalog of old software, far more competition in the market, mods, and you're able to run whatever software you want alongside games (discord, teamspeak, game streaming, etc.).

Macs are personal computers, whether or not they come from some official IBM Personal Computer compatibility bloodline.

Steam Deck - 6 million

Sega Saturn - 9 million

Wii U - 13 million

PlayStation 5 - 80 million

Nintendo Switch - 150 million

Nintendo Switch 2 opening weekend - 4 million in 3 days

Sure.

For comparison, the lifetime sales of the first Nintendo Switch would be considered a good year for iPhone sales -- six generations of phones sold >150MM units.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph...

And in the last 48 hours, Steam peaked at 39.5M users online, providing a highly pessimistic lower-bound on how many PC gamers there are.

https://store.steampowered.com/stats/stats/

If you consider time zones (not every PC gamer is online at the same time), the fact that it's not the weekend, and other factors, I'd estimate the PC gaming audience is at least 100M.

Unfortunately, there's no possible way to get an exact number. There are multiple gaming PC manufacturers, not to mention how many gaming PCs are going to be built by hand. I'm part of a PC gaming community, and nearly 90% of us have a PC built by either themselves or a friend/family. https://pdxlan.net/lan-stats/

I mean, I worked in this space, and I'm telling you why many of the people I worked with weren't interested in supporting Apple. I'm happy to hear your theories if you don't like mine, though.

I think the past bit people, but unlike the PS4 transition or gaming consoles in the past (which were rarely backwards compatible), there wasn't enough cultural momentum to plow through it... leaving "don't support Apple" as a bit of a institutional memory at this point, even though the odds of another transition seem almost nonexistent. What would it even be? 128 bit? Back to x86? Notarization++? Metal 4 incompatible with Metal 1?

Yeah, I buy that, so I think we are actually agreeing with each other. The very rough backwards support story Apple has had for the past decade, which I mentioned, has made people uninterested in supporting the platform, even if they're better about it now, as you claim (though I'm unconvinced about that personally, having worked on macOS software for more than a decade).

> What would it even be? 128 bit? Back to x86? Notarization++? Metal 4 incompatible with Metal 1?

Sure, I can think of lots of things. Every macOS update when I worked in this space broke something that we had to go fix. Code signature requirements change a bit in almost every release, not hard to imagine a 10-year-old game finally running afoul of some new requirement. I can easily see them removing old, unmaintained APIs. OpenGL is actively unmaintained and I would guess a massive attack vector, not hard to see that going away. Have you ever seen their controller force feedback APIs? Lol, they're so bad, it's a miracle they haven't removed those already.

> even though the odds of another transition seem almost nonexistent.

You see, the existence of that "almost" is already less confidence than developers have on every game console as well as Linux and Windows.

> I've heard this argument, but it also doesn't pass the sniff test in 2025.

I mean, it's at least partially true. I used to play BioShock Infinite on my MacBook in high school, there was a full port. Unfortunately it's 32 bit and doesn't run anymore and there hasn't been a remaster yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com